Matthew Desmond, sociologist: ‘We should ask ourselves if the companies we give our money to are exploiting their workers’

Matthew Desmond is one of the most respected sociologists in the United States. He is also a man of action. To write Evicted, which won him a Pulitzer Prize in 2017, he lived for years in a Milwaukee RV park, seeing fellow tenants struggle against heartless landlords on the front-lines of U.S. poverty. He took some 4,000 pages of notes that he later turned into a powerful book.

Desmond welcomed us into his Princeton University office at the end of March, weeks after having conquered a space not typically designed for professors like him: The Daily Show, Jon Stewart’s famous political humor show. The comedian had invited him on to speak about a book that Desmond published two years ago, Poverty, by America. In the book, the author asks why poverty rates in the United States, the richest country in the world, are higher than any other advanced democracy.

Question. So why are they?

Answer. Because a lot of us benefit from it. We consume the goods the working poor produce. Half of us are invested in the stock market, our returns go up like magic, even when that comes at a human sacrifice. We have this imbalanced welfare state. We’re giving the most money to families that need it the least, in terms of tax breaks. We do a lot more to guard fortunes than to fight poverty, and the country continues to be super-segregated. And we remain a deeply segregated society: so many of us build walls around our communities, and we hoard opportunities behind those walls.

Q. So it’s not about blaming the 1%, but rather, the 90%.

A. More like the 70 to 80%. It’s not just about a guy who is richer than you. Yes, we need to have a conversation about the top 1%, but that doesn’t absolve the top 10% or 20%. During the pandemic, the country bought 300,000-some speed boats. That wasn’t just the billionaires.

Q. Your book includes a startling statistic: with $177 billion, it would be possible to end poverty in the United States.

A. It doesn’t seem to be much money.

Q. Especially since right now, public discourse is dominated by Trump and his oligarchs, who rather obscenely talk about billions and trillions of dollars.

A. It’s less than 1% of our GDP. There’s a study that showed that if the top 1% of income earners just paid all their federal income taxes, we could net about $175 billion more a year, just about enough to close the poverty gap. Americans believe we can’t solve this problem, when it’s clear that we can. A sensible tax reform would be enough. The problem is that those of us that are benefiting from those tax breaks really like them.

Q. In the book, you make the case for becoming poverty abolitionists. What is the basic guide to making that happen?

A. If we’re connected to that imbalanced tax system, we should try to divest from it. In America, we have this mortgage interest deduction. Most of this benefit goes to families making six figures a year or more. Eighty-four percent of the benefit goes to white families. I qualify for this, which I think is really impossible to justify on moral grounds. So what do I do about that? What we do as a family is we calculate what we get, and we give that money away to the local homeless shelter and eviction defense. It’s not enough to simply avoid investing in weapons or fossil fuel companies. We need to start asking whether the companies we give our money to are exploiting their workers. We must stop profiting from those living in poverty who bring us our food or deliver our Amazon packages. We have to be anti-segregationist too. We should build affordable housing in our own communities.

Q. Trump started his career in real estate by evicting poor tenants from their homes. What can be expected from the second Trump administration?

A. It does seem that the cuts the Trump administration is proposing will be borne heavily on the back of the most vulnerable folks to fund an extension of tax breaks, and that half of those benefits will flow to the top 5%, the folks making over $300,000 a year. There doesn’t seem to be any serious policy ideas to help the most vulnerable, including so many of those voters who supported him on his message of economic populism.

Q. Evicted can be read as the B side of the American dream. Living in this supposed land of opportunities leads to the realization that it is as least as easy to fall as it is to rise.

A. Poverty is like a vicious circle, one problem piled on top of another. An eviction forces you to move to a worse neighborhood, to lose your job. It has long-term mental health issues. Something as innocent as falling two months behind in rent can lead to all these compounding problems.

Q. Where do you see resistance to Trump?

A. One of the interesting things that’s happened recently is these rallies that AOC [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] and Bernie [Sanders] have had. Their message is that we’re not going to allow an oligarchy to take shape, and we’re also going to fight for working-class people.

Q. Meanwhile, the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, has been brandishing his chainsaw. How have the actions of his Department of Government Efficiency affected the fight against poverty?

A. In his first term, Trump wanted to cut food stamps by 25 to 30% over 10 years, huge slashes. He proposed cuts to Medicaid and rolled back worker protections. He limited overtime pay and proposed limiting benefits for kids with disabilities. What’s happening in the government right now with DOGE is that many of the cuts are going to be borne by our most vulnerable families.

Q. One of Trump’s favorite sayings is that the federal government is full of “fraud, waste and abuse.” I was surprised to read in your book that much of the money earmarked for alleviating poverty is not even used.

A. We thought that the problem was stigma, that people were embarrassed, but it seems like it’s just inefficiency, red tape and bureaucracy. In California to get food stamps, you have to fill out 260 questions.

Q. I’m going to read a phrase I underlined in your book: “complexity is the refuge of the powerful.”

A. That’s right. They use it to make us think that a problem, like poverty, is really impossible to fix. They do it by forming a lot of committees.

Q. We’re sitting here in one of the United States’s most prestigious universities. Would you say that institutions are showing enough bravery in the face of Trump’s attacks?

A. I feel like that’s a little out of my pay grade. I guess one of the things I’ve been feeling is that liberal establishments, including the Democratic Party, need to have a full-throated defense of their existence. I think that the university can make an incredibly strong case for all the things that it’s done for America.

Q. Do you feel afraid?

A. There’s something weird about studying poverty. I’m working on my next book, a deep reporting project. I’m spending a lot of time with folks that are going through hardship. I’m paying attention to the political system, and obviously I’m deeply concerned. But the problem I work on is a long, old problem.

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